Pluses

Plus tornado is finished.  Let's be honest...it was finished a while ago.

The pattern is from here and the coloring is sort of from here.  I did less of a rainbow pattern, and the inside pluses are a different color.  I'm not completely sure why I did that.

It is bright and colorful for the little baby though.  When I stopped over to give it to her parents, they both noticed that there was a music score in the inside pluses.  They both, separately, said, "I wonder if I can tell what the music is."  However, it is well quilted and in small squares, so they were not able to figure it out.

I quilted something different in each color family.  I just did whatever I felt like, using thread that was about the same color as the fabric.  Oranges got a double orange peel and greens got back and forth.

Pinks got a double loop.

Blues have a wood grain.

Yellow has sea foam.

Purple has squares and rectangles.

And last, but not least, the background has pluses.

It was a fun quilt.  It isn't my new favorite, as newly finished quilts often are, but I did enjoy picking out all the different fabrics and different quilting patterns.

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday.

Big plus, little plus (what begins with plus?)

After about five years, "Big Plus, Little Plus"* is finally finished

 

It'll be for a little boy due any day now...I'm rather excited that I finished before the baby came!

 

This time I took pictures at my parents' cottage.  I took them just as the sun was setting, which was rather bad for coloring but great for background.

The quilt is made of a bunch of strips; it was the easiest way to get all of the little pluses in correctly.  I started the design by putting in the big plus and then added the little pluses until I had them scattered about nicely.  

I then made a crazy spreadsheet with the color/size in of each piece in it's location.  Instead of just working on a strip or two at a time I first pieced the top two pieces of each row, then added the third piece, etc.  It was a rather silly way of doing it and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what strip I had.  I'm going to chalk up the foolishness to still being a rather new quilter when I started, as it is quilt number 7.  (To put it in perspective, I just started working on quilt 62.  They aren't all done, but I do have more experience now.)

The photo above is my favorite.  The one below is the silliest...I think the quilt looks like it is trying to play hide and seek and hide by the logs.

For quilting I used my plus design and a lightly variegated white/grey thread.  

There are whales in minky on the back; I couldn't believe how well the colors matched!  And it is bound in red sateen as normal.

*It took me until I was editing the photos to realize that this shape is not really a plus.  That's a long time of getting the shape wrong, so I'm going to stick with the name to remind me to actually look at what I'm doing.

Finishing this was my goal for July.  I'm also linking up with Finish It Up Friday and Sew Cute Tuesday.

Plus Plus finish

Plus Plus is finished!

I won the pattern last year through ALYoF from Meadow Mist Designs.  It took a while before finding just the right reason to make it up; an old friend was having another baby.  We didn't find out about the baby until just a few months before he was born, so I was looking for something that would go together pretty quickly.  Not only did it go together well, the pattern was also excellently written.

I started with the same fabrics as Matrix and then sort of changed everything.  I added yellow.  The colors got changed to solids.  I decided to use the greys that I already had on hand for the rest of the pluses.  So while the overall color feel is similar, there ended up being many changes too.

I took the pictures in the middle of a snowstorm.  So even though some of the fabrics might looked speckled with white, they're actually all solids.  The snow was coming down quickly.

I used my normal minky with sateen binding.  I love the combo.

For the quilting, I used Plus Quilting.  (There's a tutorial here.)  I love how it turned out and how it echoes the pieced design.  And it is an all-over pattern, so it quilted up pretty quickly too.

This was my February goal for One Monthly Goal.  I'll also be linking up with Sew Cute Tuesday and Finish it Up Friday.

Plus quilting

In advance of the upcoming Plus quilt finish, I thought I'd share with you how I did the quilting.  I like it since it matches the quilt piecing design so well.

1.  I'm showing the steps after doing a few pluses, but it would work at the beginning too.  For the example, we want to go to the left.  I apologize for my paint skills...who would have thought that I'd be better at quilting perpendicular lines than drawing them on the computer?  I left it as is though, because I didn't want to make it too perfect.

 2.  Go a little bit past where you want to turn (the red line).

 3. Travel back on the line you just made and then when you reach the place where you want to make the turn go the opposite way of where you want to go.  (Blue line)

 4.  Travel back on the blue line and continue on in the way you wanted to turn. (Purple line)  Continue as desired to fill the space.

 A. Sometimes you get a little stuck, but you can just add an extra cross. (Green line)

 B. Travel back on your original line and turn off, making one of the legs.  (Red line)

 C.  Travel back on that leg, going beyond the main line.   Then travel back on that little leg to the main line, turn onto it and travel back down it. (Blue line)

 D. Once you reach a place to "escape", turn and go the wrong way, then travel back on that leg and go the correct way.  Continue on as desired. (Brown line.)